To a scholar, or I would have thought any educated person, the word ‘extremism’ doesn’t signify much. You can have an ‘extreme’ anything; even ‘extreme moderation’, if you’re willing to be pedantic about it (and a bit silly). Extremism is a word that is used rather loosely and vaguely today, generally in order to describe opinions and activities which go further than one’s own in one direction or another; all of which could be easily and more clearly expressed in other ways. Racism is an obvious example; but then maybe anti-racism too, depending on the form it takes? Support for terrorism is another. Fascism comes into this category, so long as it’s carefully defined; and communism, ditto. (There are several different species of both.) Others might include pacifism, noisy demonstrations, veganism, anti-vaccination, anti- or pro-abortion, flat-earthism, UFO-ism, and many dogmatic forms of religion. Beliefs that were considered ‘extreme’ in the past, but no longer are, include atheism, democracy and feminism. That just indicates how the meaning of abstract words can change. I’m faintly puzzled by the fact that ‘neoliberalism’ is rarely categorised as ‘extremist’ today, as I’m pretty sure it will be when history moves on. That’s because it has now come to be ‘normalised’; although in logic that should not make it any less ‘extreme’.

Recently British government ministers, led by Michael Gove, have been working on a plan to outlaw ‘extremism’, based on their own definition of it as ‘the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values’. (See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/04/plans-to-redefine-extremism-would-include-undermining-uk-values.) Obviously that is almost as vague and catch-all as the e-word itself – what ‘system’? which ‘institutions? what ‘values’? – but is nonetheless the definition that Gove and his right-wing colleagues are now seeking to pass into law. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/09/revealed-legal-fears-over-michael-gove-definition-extremism.)

With no more detailed guidance being offered as to the particular ideas and groups that are being targeted, all we have to go on is the views and policies of Conservative ministers and MPs in recent months. What they have been concentrating on are pro-Palestinian – or indeed any – demonstrations, especially those that stop traffic; Moslems; the ‘culture wars’; ‘no-platforming’; gender transitioning; lethal attacks on MPs (fair enough, but they have the ordinary law to counter that); and the residue of ‘Corbynism’ (which might include me). It’s the demonstrations, I think, that mainly irritate them, and that they would like to literally outlaw altogether if they could. Suella Braverman calls them ‘hate marches’, which of course they aren’t, but is a good way of blackening them. Already the legislation governing ‘demos’ has been tightened up, in ways that are alarming civil rights advocates. But this is just the sort of thing that our right-wing government thinks the reactionary ‘red wall’ (northern working-class voters) will respond to in the coming general election. And the word ‘extremism’ helps here too.

I don’t know how it can be countered. Perhaps Keir Starmer does. (I’m presently up to page 307 of Tom Baldwin’s recent biography of him: no clue so far.) The conventional wisdom is that the Tories are now reconciled to losing the election, when they’ll regroup on the even further Right of British politics, to resume battle from that ‘extreme’. But of course they won’t call it this. One person’s ‘extremism’ is another’s ‘common sense’, or ‘voice of the people’. It’s just a word, intended to confound.